What competence be one of a world’s biggest archaeological treasures scarcely slipped by Barry Clifford’s grasp.

Back in 2003, Clifford, an underwater archaeological explorer, and his organisation detected a delicious plague off a seashore of Haiti. The mutilate sat in accurately a mark where Clifford reckoned Christopher Columbus’ flagship, a Santa Maria, had sunk on Christmas Day in 1492, reduction than 3 months after Columbus reached a New World for a initial time.

Archaeologists “eliminated a site as not being what we were looking for,” Clifford told USA TODAY in an talk Tuesday. He went on to make an downright consult of a waters off Haiti, “spending a tiny happening … (and) expelling each other possibility, to a indicate where we threw my hands adult in a air, and we don’t do that really often.”

Today, a few weeks after returning to a wreck, Clifford, who detected a bandit boat Whydah, says he thinks there’s clever justification his group has indeed snagged one of a many sought after archaeological sites in a story of tellurian exploration. He says a once-scorned plague is a Santa Maria, a slow, tubby though solidly built let vessel that carried Columbus and his group on a excursion that suggested a existence of a New World to a Old.

The team’s lapse to what could be a skeleton of a Santa Maria sprang out of a late-night explanation about 9 years after a group located a wreck. Clifford, who’d been study 15th-century ordnance, bolted watchful to a fulfilment that a tube his son had photographed in a mutilate in 2003 was a lombard, an open-ended cannon renouned during Columbus’ day. That led to a fulfilment that he’d substantially found a Santa Maria, usually to desert it.

He and his group returned to a site a few weeks ago, usually to find it looted of a lombard, several wheels that would’ve been used to scheme a cannon and a square of a rudder mechanism. Other justification from a site strongly points to a mutilate being a Santa Maria, he said.

Columbus wrote that a mutilate was 1½ leagues from La Navidad, a fortified outpost he founded in what is now Haiti after a detriment of a Santa Maria, Clifford said. The mutilate sits a homogeneous of 1½ leagues from a site suspected to be La Navidad.

The wreck’s resting place lies nearby violation waves, as Columbus reported. It was in a sandy spot, as pragmatic in Columbus’ journal.

At a site, a group found a margin of stones 40 feet prolonged and 20 feet wide. That corresponds to a expected measure of a Santa Maria, that would’ve carried counterbalance stones in her hold.

“Everything fit a equation,” pronounced Clifford, who combined that a group ruled out other wrecks in a same vicinity. He has a Haitian assent to try a mutilate though doesn’t devise to ensue immediately. The tip priority, he said, contingency be a insurance of a mutilate from looters.

Clifford suspects value hunters nabbed a many permitted artifacts, including a lombard. He has usually a sketch of it, and he hopes a champion will step in to offer a prerogative for information on a locale of a artifacts.

There might be most some-more to find. There could be wooden ruins of a boat buried in a sediments, Clifford said, and more.

“It’s a large raise of rocks,” he said, “but there’s a lot some-more to it than that. I’m not going to tell we what it is.”

One outward consultant says Clifford might be onto something.

“There is some really constrained justification from a 2003 photographs of a site and from a new reconnoitering dives that this mutilate might good be a Santa Maria,” Indiana University’s Charles Beeker told The Independent, a British journal that initial reported a discovery.

Another consultant expresses caution.

“If this is a really early Spanish shipwreck, it should be looked during by a series of opposite people who are gifted in … archaeological sites from that time period,” pronounced Roger Smith, Florida’s state underwater archaeologist, who has prolonged knowledge study shipwrecks.

To be certain a boat is a right vintage, experts would have to inspect a pattern of a hull, justification for how a boat was rigged, a chain of a arms and how it was built, Smith said. When an early plague was detected off Pensacola, Smith and his colleagues brought in experts on coins, aged wood, stones and plant and animal stays to assistance brand a vessel.